Standard disclaimer, I work on Dart. And normally I'd avoid engaging a borderline troll, but this is such a terrible comment, in so many ways, that I have to speak up.
> Never rely on Google for anything
First, you're expectation that Google will drop Dart is based on what exactly? A few SaaS product cancelations? The "never rely on Google" meme is getting so old, mainly because it's overly applied to Google when all SaaS providers have this issue, and it's been a known downside for years: when product support ends for an installed app, you still have the old installed app to use, when support is ended for SaaS users have a problem. I hope this can be mitigated one day, but that's a whole other topic. The differences with Google is that we have a ton of users even for our "small" products, and there's a single name to attach attention to, rather than the numerous shutdowns that have happened in other companies, or the startups that have bee bought and killed.
The important bit for the discussion at hand is that Dart is not even _anything_ as a service. It's a set of installed, open source compilers and libraries. They will continue to work in the (unlikely, IMO) event that Google drops support.
> This means that any developer taking over Dart would have to support the IDE, the VM, the javascript transcoder, the language, integration with new browser features, cross browser compatibility, etc.
Dart's more of a collection of independent pieces. If Google ever did completely drop Dart I'm pretty sure that the parts could be maintained by the community (assuming the community hits critical mass). The dart2js compiler is the most important part and it's well structured, easy to understand code. The IDE could be abandoned in favor of plugins for WebStorm (already maintained by IDEA), Sublime, vim, etc.
> Dart has neither income nor traction.
Dart will never have income, that's not its purpose. Dart's purpose is to make web development easier, more productive and more scalable, and web apps themselves faster. This goal is both for internal development, for which we badly need something like Dart, and for everyone else because we want to see more and better web apps.
As for traction, if Dart doesn't get any traction (after it's actually released, and had a good chance to succeed of course!), inside Google or outside, then it probably _should_ be abandoned, right? In that case, who exactly is there to care that it's not developed anymore?
I've heard some people point to GWT as an example of what might happen to Dart. I don't agree, but for the sake of argument, let's look at where GWT is: 1) There's an official community maintaining GWT, 2) Google still has a team working on GWT, and large projects using it. 3) GWT will still get better as Java gets better. There are other factors that apply to GWT and it's language that don't apply to Dart. If Dart's fate was ever the same as GWT, I'd say it'd be a pretty soft landing for everyone.
> Just to add, Google can artificially increase traction of Dart by putting the Dart runtime inside Chrome and using that as a weapon to increase Chrome adoption, similar to Microsoft's ActiveX strategy.
This is still a ridiculous comparison. ActiveX was a plug-in architecture. Dart compiles to JavaScript. We support all "modern" browsers, IE9 and up.
Look, we've made no bones about wanting to get the VM into browsers some day. And obviously, being part of the Chrome team, we'd like to see it in Chrome. Lars pointed out at Google I/O that there's work already being done to pave the way for this on the memory management side. The Dart VM does enable faster and quicker to startup applications, no doubt.
But we all understand that Dart will be distributed as JavaScript for the foreseeable future, and we do considerable work to ensure that programs behave the same in dart2js and the VM, and that the JS output is very fast. The Dart and Chrome teams firmly believe that the adoption of Dart will entirely depend on it's success as a compile-to-JS language. How Dart helps developers will be its main draw, and hopefully there's organic demand for the VM as an accelerator for apps that already work well across the web.
This will not be "evil" in anyway, but one of many ways that the browser vendors have pushed the web forward. There are so many examples of a vendor pushing something that's initially totally or somewhat proprietary but end up being a great thing for the web, that only comparing Dart to ActiveX is just juvenile and annoying. Consider JavaScript itself, XHR, <canvas>, CSS, SVG, WebGL, setImmediate() and so many other DOM APIs, CSS extensions like rounded corners, shadows, transforms, etc. Some of these have actually been much more backwards-incompatible than Dart which primarily _compiles_to_JS_.
The FUD around Dart is just incredible. No matter though. We see the benefit every day that we luckily get to code in Dart, and so does our community. Those who wish to reap the benefits Dart can opt-in and those who don't can ignore it.